were dictated by the burghers and sworn to by the monarch.  They were concessions from above; privileges private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had invaded, than to overturn the system.  Thus the cities, not regarding themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence.  As persons, therefore—­gigantic individualities—­they wheeled into the feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities.  The city of Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals, trampling upon its slaves.

Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.  Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it goes.  Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity.  The people has hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies buried.  There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities.  In the northern Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued longest.  Even in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient Frisians, had been forfeited in a variety of ways.  Slavery was both voluntary and compulsory.  Paupers sold themselves that they might escape starvation.  The timid sold themselves that they might escape violence.  These voluntary sales, which were frequent, wore usually made to cloisters and ecclesiastical establishments, for the condition of Church-slaves was preferable to that of other serfs.  Persons worsted in judicial duels, shipwrecked sailors, vagrants, strangers, criminals unable to pay the money-bote imposed upon them, were all deprived of freedom; but the prolific source of slavery was war.  Prisoners were almost universally reduced to servitude.  A free woman who intermarried with a slave condemned herself and offspring to perpetual bondage.  Among the Ripuarian Franks, a free woman thus disgracing herself, was girt with a sword and a distaff.  Choosing the one, she was to strike her husband dead; choosing the other, she adopted the symbol of slavery, and became a chattel for life.